Papers › Modeling Past and Future for Neural Machine Translation

Modeling Past and Future for Neural Machine Translation

27 Nov 2017TACL 2018 1arXiv:1711.09502archive 2025-07-28

Zaixiang Zheng, Hao Zhou, Shu-Jian Huang, Lili Mou, Xin-yu Dai, Jia-Jun Chen, Zhaopeng Tu

Existing neural machine translation systems do not explicitly model what has been translated and what has not during the decoding phase. To address this problem, we propose a novel mechanism that separates the source information into two parts: translated Past contents and untranslated Future contents, which are modeled by two additional recurrent layers. The Past and Future contents are fed to both the attention model and the decoder states, which offers NMT systems the knowledge of translated and untranslated contents. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves translation performance in Chinese-English, German-English and English-German translation tasks. Specifically, the proposed model outperforms the conventional coverage model in both of the translation quality and the alignment error rate.

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